'Improvements’ leave us more vulnerable

Saturday

A recent letter on cable competition had conditional merit to our community.

True it is that competition may help control costs to our consumers.

But the evolution of providing and/or combining voice, data and entertainment on a single fiber or coaxial cable undermines our local, parish, state and national public safety and security.

Those who lost their telephone service provided on that single fiber or coax in the aftermath of hurricanes Katrina and Rita maintained their 911 services and their telephone services for only a few hours; these telephone services were supported by a modest proprietary battery sitting in their home or business network interface device.

Our traditional copper pair telephone service provides the power from the telephone provider to keep our telephones operational during electrical power outages.

The copper pair telephone provider’s facility traditionally has the most reliable emergency power to keep our home’s nonwireless telephone operational during these power outages.

Businesses have traditionally understood the risks of combining services and lines.

Businesses that use copper, fiber or coaxial feeds to their business telephone switch and key system will always have separate and dedicated copper for their emergency, safety and security services.

Whether it is voice over Internet Protocol or voice over Time Division Multiplex feeds, each requires power at the local site for voice, data or video; the provider does not provide this power.

Cellular services do not overcome the shortcomings of voice over fiber or coaxial cable. Each cellular tower antenna that connects us to the public or a private telephone system depends on power at that tower site and the fiber or copper between that tower and a telephone company provider’s facility.

Cellular providers maintain spotty emergency power at the tower for extended power outages.

As we herald in competition to stabilize our telecommunication and computing costs, we must be vigilant as to their reliability during natural and unnatural disasters.

The fragility of today’s “state of the art” telecommunications and computing services were evident in the aftermath of hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

Marc Samuels

Baton Rouge

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